Department of English Literature Graduate Theseshttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/7952016-12-10T03:01:20Z2016-12-10T03:01:20ZMaking the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974Bourget, Jasonhttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/152452016-11-29T13:43:52ZMaking the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974
Bourget, Jason
Suggesting that the political diversity of American science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a response to the dominance of social liberalism throughout the 1940s and 1950s, I argue in Making the Men of Tomorrow that the development of new hegemonic masculinities in science fiction is a consequence of political speculation. Focusing on four representative and influential texts from the 1960s and early 1970s, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this thesis explores the relationship between different conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and three separate but related political ideologies: the social ethic, market libertarianism, and socialist libertarianism. In the first two chapters in which I discuss Dick’s novels, I argue that Dick interrogates organizational masculinity as part of a larger project that suggests the inevitable infeasibility of both the social ethic and its predecessor, social liberalism. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a way of showing how, unlike Dick, other authors of the 1960s and early 1970s sought to move beyond social liberalism by imagining how new political ideologies, in this case market libertarianism, might change the way men see themselves. Having demonstrated how the libertarian potential of Heinlein’s novel is ultimately undermined by its insistent and uncompromising biological determinism, I then discuss how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the socialist libertarianism of the moon Anarres to suggest a more egalitarian form of masculinity, one that makes possible, to some extent at least, a future in which men might embrace not only the mutual aid of socialism, but also the primacy of individual rights that is at the heart of all forms of libertarianism and liberalism.
A Poetics of Annotation: Alexander Pope's FootnotesBourne, Donaldhttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/150032016-11-16T05:47:24Z2016-09-28T00:00:00ZA Poetics of Annotation: Alexander Pope's Footnotes
Bourne, Donald
Studies of Alexander Pope's poetry tend to examine only the footnotes to his Dunciads, if they examine his footnotes at all. This dissertation will address this deficit in our understanding of Pope's poetics through an examination of Pope's use of footnotes in support of his verse throughout his career. With Gerard Genette's taxonomy of footnotes as variously paratext and text and Hugh Kenner's idea of the technological space of the printed page as frameworks within which Pope's footnotes operate, this dissertation will show that – over the course of his career – Pope developed a poetics of annotation that deployed footnotes rhetorically as appeals to ethos and pathos that both built up Pope's own authorial ethos for his audience in the literary market place of early eighteenth-century London and for posterity and used that authorial ethos in support of his literary and political friends.
Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2016-09-26 22:56:20.904
2016-09-28T00:00:00ZBritish Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary UnityTambar, Jaspreet S.http://hdl.handle.net/1974/150012016-11-17T13:44:06Z2016-09-28T00:00:00ZBritish Romantic Criticism and the Fine Arts: A Study in Philosophical Theories of Literary Unity
Tambar, Jaspreet S.
This dissertation is an exploration of how a small but important group of Romantic critics, finding fault in the ideal of three unities developed by neoclassical Academicians and wrongly attributed to Aristotle, turned to the terminology and practices of the fine arts to emphasize their conception of organic unity in literature. The Romantic analogy to painting in particular enables a philosophical criticism of literature to present the aesthetic semblance of painting, the comprehension of a multitude of details in a harmonious whole that is a natural unity to its medium, as a paradigm of modern-romantic poetry and its aspirations to similar complexity, particularity, and imaginative colour. Further, in extension of the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes of the seventeenth century, the division of ancient and romantic art by Romantic critics like August Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt not only establishes an ethnological and historical difference between the artistic productions of these two cultural periods but also allows, unlike the neoclassical unities, a non-anachronistic philosophical vocabulary of whole and parts or of the general and particular in the criticism of poetry, which involution provides a “rule” more consonant with the laws of the imagination rather than with the rhetorical and absolutist dicta that were thither available in the literary canon.
Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2016-09-27 14:37:04.998
2016-09-28T00:00:00ZDisruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women's Writing 1811-1925Bruusgaard, Emily J.http://hdl.handle.net/1974/146942016-11-24T16:13:09Z2016-08-06T00:00:00ZDisruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women's Writing 1811-1925
Bruusgaard, Emily J.
Images of domestic textiles (items made at home for consumption within the household) and textile making form an important subtext to women’s writing, both during and after industrialization. Through a close reading of five novels from the period 1811-1925, this thesis will assert that a detailed understanding of textile work and its place in women’s daily lives is critical to a deeper understanding of social, sexual and political issues from a woman’s perspective. The first chapter will explore the history of the relationship between women and domestic textile making, and the changes wrought to the latter by the Industrial Revolution. The second chapter will examine the role of embroidery in the construction of “appropriate” feminine gentility in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The third chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), will explore how the older female body became a repository for anxieties about class mobility and female power at the beginning of the Victorian era. The fourth chapter will compare Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to consider how later Victorian women both internalized and refuted public narratives of domestic textile making in a quest for “self-ownership.” The last chapter, on Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), examines the corrosive, yet ultimately redemptive, relationships of a family of women trapped by abuse and degradation. For all five authors, images of textiles and textile making allow them to speak to issues that were usually only discussed within a community of women: sexuality, desire, aging, marriage, and motherhood. In all five works, textile making “talks back” to the power structures that marginalize women, and lends insight into the material and emotional circumstances of women’s lives.
Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2016-08-03 13:57:45.102
2016-08-06T00:00:00Z